THE EMERGENCE OF MR. GANDHI
Before this great statute could be brought into operation, and even
whilst Parliament was still laboriously evolving it, a strange and
incalculable figure was coming to the forefront in India, who, favoured
by an extraordinary combination of untoward circumstances, was to rally
round him some of the most and many of the least reputable forces which,
sometimes under new disguises, the old and passive civilisation of India
is instinctively driven to oppose to the disintegrating impact upon it
of the active and disturbing energies of Western civilisation. Saint and
prophet in the eyes of the multitude of his followers--saint in the eyes
even of many who have not accepted him as a prophet--Mr. Gandhi preaches
to-day under the uninspiring name of "Non-co-operation," a gospel of
revolt none the less formidable because it is so far mainly a gospel of
negation and retrogression, of destruction not construction. Mr. Gandhi
challenges not only the material but the moral foundations of British
rule. He has passed judgment upon both British rule and Western
civilisation, and, condemning both as "Satanic," his cry is away with
the one and with the other, and "back to the Vedas," the fountain source
of ancient Hinduism. That he is a power in the land none can deny, least
of all since the new Viceroy, Lord Reading, almost immediately on his
arrival in India, spent long hours in close conference with him at
Simla. What manner of man is Mr. Gandhi, whom Indians revere as a
Mahatma, _i.e._ an inspired sage upon whom the wisdom of the ancient
Rishis has descended? What is the secret of his power?
Born in 1869 in a Gujarat district in the north of the Bombay
Presidency, Mohandas Karamchamd Gandhi comes of very respectable Hindu
parentage, but does not belong to one of the higher castes. His father,
like others of his forebears, was Dewan, or chief administrator, of one
of the small native States of Kathiawar. He himself was brought up for
the Bar and, after receiving the usual English education in India,
completed his studies in England, first as an undergraduate of the
London University and then at the Inner Temple. His friend and
biographer, Mr. H.S.L. Polak, tells us that his mother, whose religious
example and influence made a lasting impression upon his character, held
the most orthodox Hindu views, and only agreed to his crossing "the
Black Water" to England after exacting from him a three-fold vow, which
he faithfully kept, of abstinence from flesh, alcohol, and women. He
returned to India as soon as he had been called to the Bar and began to
practise as an advocate before the Bombay High Court, but in 1893, as
fate would have it, he was to be called to South Africa in connection
with an Indian legal case in Natal. In South Africa he was brought at
once into contact with a bitter conflict of rights between the European
population and the Indian settlers who had originally been induced to go
out and work there at the instance of the white communities who were in
need of cheap labour for the development of the country. The Europeans,
professing to fear the effects of a large admixture of Asiatic elements,
had begun not only to restrict further Indian immigration, but to place
the Indians already in South Africa under many disabilities all the more
oppressive because imposed on racial grounds. Natal treated them
harshly, but scarcely as harshly as the Transvaal, then still under Boer
government. In the Transvaal the Imperial Government took up the cudgels
for them, and the treatment of the Indian settlers there was one of the
grievances pressed by Lord Milner during the negotiations which preceded
the final rupture with the Boer Republics. When the South African war
broke out Mr. Gandhi believed that it would lead to a generous
recognition of the rights of Indians if they at once identified their
cause with that of the British, and he induced Government to accept his
offer of an Indian Ambulance Corps which did excellent service in the
field. Mr. Gandhi himself served with it, was mentioned in despatches,
and received the war medal. His health gave way, and he returned to
India in 1901 where he resumed practice in Bombay with no intention of
returning to South Africa, as he felt confident that when the war was
over the Imperial Government would see to it that the Indians should
have the benefit of the principles which it had itself proclaimed before
going into the war. He was, however, induced to return in 1903 to help
in preparing the Indian memorials to be laid before Mr. Chamberlain
whose visit was imminent in connection with the work of reconstruction.
On his arrival he found that conditions and European opinion were
becoming more instead of less unfavourable for Indians, and though in
1906, when the native rebellion broke out in Natal, he again offered and
secured the acceptance of an Indian Stretcher-Bearer Corps with which he
again served and received the thanks of the Governor, he gradually found
himself driven into an attitude of more and more open opposition and
even conflict with Government by a series of measures imposing more and
more intolerable restraints upon his countrymen. It was in 1906 that he
first took a vow of passive resistance to a law which he regarded as a
deliberate attack upon their religion, their national honour, and their
racial self-respect. In the following year he was consigned, not for the
first time, to jail in Pretoria, but his indomitable attitude helped to
bring about a compromise. It was, however, short-lived, as
misunderstandings occurred as to its interpretation. The struggle broke
out afresh until another provisional settlement promised to lead to a
permanent solution, when Mr. Gokhale, after consultation with the India
Office during a visit to England, was induced in 1912 to proceed to
South Africa and use his good offices in a cause which he had long had
at heart. Whether, as Mr. Gokhale himself always contended, as a
deliberate breach of the promise made to him by the principal Union
Ministers, or as the result of a lamentable misunderstanding, measures
were again taken in 1913 which led Mr. Gandhi to renew the struggle, and
it assumed at once a far more serious character than ever before. It was
then that Mr. Gandhi organised his big strikes of Indian labour and
headed the great strikers' march of protest into the Transvaal which led
to the arrest and imprisonment of the principal leaders and of hundreds
of the rank and file. The furious indignation aroused in India, the
public meetings held in all the large centres, and the protest entered
by the Viceroy himself, Lord Hardinge, in his speech at Madras, combined
with earnest representations from Whitehall, compelled General Smuts to
enter once more the path of conciliation and compromise. As the result
of a Commission of Inquiry the Indians' Relief Act was passed, and in
the correspondence between Mr. Gandhi and General Smuts the latter
undertook on behalf of the South African Government to carry through
other administrative reforms not actually specified in the new Act. Mr.
Gandhi returned to India just after the outbreak of the Great War, and
the Government of India marked its appreciation of the great services
which he had rendered to his countrymen in South Africa by recommending
him for the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal, which was conferred upon him
amongst the New Year honours of 1915.
The South African stage of Mr. Gandhi's career is of great importance,
as it goes far to explain both the views and the methods which he
afterwards applied in India. He brought back with him from South Africa
a profound distrust of Western civilisation, of which he had
unquestionably witnessed there some of the worst aspects, and also a
strong belief in the efficacy of passive resistance as the most peaceful
means of securing the redress of all Indian grievances in India as well
as in South Africa should they ever become in his opinion unendurable.
Mr. Gokhale, before he died, obtained a promise from him that for at
least a year he would not attempt to give practical expression to the
extreme views which he had already set forth in the proscribed pamphlet
_Hind Swaraj_. At an early age Mr. Gandhi had fallen under the spell of
Tolstoian philosophy, and he has admitted only quite recently that for a
time he was so much impressed with the doctrines of Christ that he was
inclined to adopt Christianity; but the further study of the spiritual
side of Hinduism convinced him that in it alone the key of salvation
could be found, and all his teachings since then have been based on his
faith in the superiority of the Indian civilisation rooted in Hinduism
to Western civilisation, which for him in fact represents in its present
stage only a triumph of gross materialism and brute force. Nevertheless,
when the Great War broke out, he was prepared to believe that the ordeal
of war in the cause of freedom for which Britain had taken up arms might
lead to the redemption of Western civilisation from its worst evils, and
whilst in London on his way to South Africa he had already offered to
form, and to enrol himself and his wife in, an Indian Volunteer
Ambulance Corps. Yet he was not blind to the flaws of the civilisation
for which he stood. He conducted a temperance campaign amongst his
countrymen in South Africa, and, brought there into close contact with
many Indians of the "untouchable" castes, he revolted against a system
which tried to erect such insurmountable barriers between man and man.
Perhaps the best clue to the many contradictions in which his activities
have continually seemed to involve him was furnished by himself when he
said, "Most religious men I have met are politicians in disguise; I,
however, who wear the guise of a politician am at heart a religious
man," and the doctrine which he holds of all others to be the
corner-stone of his religion is that of _Ahimsa_, which, as he has
described it, "requires deliberate self-suffering, not the deliberate
injuring of the wrongdoer," in the resistance of evil.
Throughout the war Mr. Gandhi devoted his ceaseless energies chiefly to
preaching social reforms and the moral regeneration of his countrymen.
He was then an honoured guest at European gatherings, as for instance at
the Madras Law dinner in 1915, at various conferences on education, at
the Bombay Provincial Co-operative Conference in 1917 when in connection
with the admirable Co-operative Credit movement in India he lectured on
the moral basis of co-operation, at missionary meetings in which he
showed his intimate familiarity with the gospels by reverently quoting
Christ's words in support of his own plea for mutual forbearance and
tolerance. As late as July 1918 he defined _Swaraj_ as partnership in
the Empire, and war service as the easiest and straightest way to win
_Swaraj_, inviting the people of his own Gujarat country whom he was
addressing to wipe it free of the reproach of effeminacy by contributing
thousands of Sepoys in response to the Viceroy's recent appeal for fresh
recruits for the Indian army at one of the most critical moments during
the war. His comments about the same time on the Montagu-Chelmsford
scheme were by no means unfavourable, and he specifically joined in the
tribute of praise bestowed upon the Indian Civil Service for their
steadfast devotion to duty and great organising ability. Government
itself resorted to his services as the member of a Commission appointed
to inquire into agrarian troubles at Camparan, and his collaboration was
warmly welcomed by his European colleagues. Nor were there any signs of
implacable hostility to British rule in his vigorous protests in the
following year against the anti-Asiatic legislation of the South
African Union which was again stirring up bad feeling in India.
The circumstances which drove him to declare war against British rule
and Western civilisation arose out of the action taken by Government on
the report of the "Sedition Committee," which, under the presidency of
Mr. Justice Rowlatt, a judge of the High Court of King's Bench, sent out
especially to preside over it, had not only carefully explored the
origins and growth of political crime during the great wave of unrest
after the Partition of Bengal, but recommended that in some directions
the hands of the executive and judicial authorities should be
strengthened to cope with any fresh outbreaks of a similar character.
The Committee pointed out that in spite of the preventive legislation of
1911 it had become apparent before the war broke out that the forces of
law and order were still inadequately equipped to cope with the
situation in Bengal. For the duration of the war the Defence of India
Act had conferred upon Government emergency powers which had enabled the
authorities summarily to intern a large number of those who were known
to be closely connected with the criminal propaganda, but almost as soon
as the war was over their release would follow automatically upon the
expiry of the Defence Act, and a dangerous situation would arise again
if Government had nothing but the old methods of procedure to fall back
upon.
In January 1919 the Government of India announced that legislation in
conformity with the recommendations of the Sedition Committee would be
required from the Imperial Legislative Council, and two draft bills were
published, one of them embodying permanent alterations in the law and
the other arming the Executive with emergency powers. The publication of
these bills threw the country into a fresh ferment of agitation, and
even an Indian judge of undeniably moderate views, Sir Narain
Chandavarkar, declared that such measures were no longer required, as
with the advent of constitutional reforms revolutionary agitation
would, he believed, cease, and, as a warm supporter of the
Montagu-Chelmsford Report, he felt bound to protest against legislation
so entirely at variance with the spirit in which the Report had been
conceived and with the expectations which it had aroused. The Extremists
read into the bills another proof of the organised hypocrisy
characteristic of British rule in general and of the Report in
particular, and denounced them as a monstrous engine of tyranny and
oppression, against which no Indian would be safe. Government, however,
was not to be moved from its determination, and in explaining the
necessity for proceeding with the bills the Viceroy pointed out in his
opening speech that "the reaction against all authority that had
manifested itself in many parts of the civilised world was unlikely to
leave India entirely untouched and the powers of evil were still
abroad." The Indian non-official members, on the other hand, were solid
in opposition, and even those who did not challenge the report of the
Sedition Committee intimated that now the war was over they could not
acquiesce in such measures until the reforms had come into operation,
and unless it was then found that revolutionary forces were still at
work and constituted a real public danger. The two amendments, supported
by all the Indian non-official members, were voted down by the official
_bloc_. Government did something to allay opposition by agreeing that
the Act which was to have been permanent should operate for three years
only, and the title of the bill was amended to show clearly that its
application would be confined to clearly anarchical and revolutionary
crimes. It was further modified in form in the committee stage, but the
opposition within the Council remained unmoved, and outside the Council
grew more and more fierce. The Extremists who had shrunk from no efforts
to misrepresent the purpose of the bills received a great accession of
strength when Mr. Gandhi instituted the vow of _Satyagraha_, or passive
resistance, under which, if the bills became law, he and his followers
would "severally refuse to obey these laws and such other laws as a
committee to be thereafter appointed might see fit," whilst they would
"faithfully follow the truth and refrain from violence to life, person,
or property." The Moderate leaders at Delhi at once issued a manifesto
condemning _Satyagraha_, but Government stuck to its guns, the bills
being finally passed on March 18, after very hot discussion. Mr. Gandhi,
having formed his committee, proclaimed a _Hartal_, _i.e._ a
demonstrative closing of shops and suspension of business for March 30.
This _Hartal_ at Delhi started a terrible outbreak which spread with
unexpected violence over parts of the Bombay Presidency and the greater
part of the Punjab, with sporadic disturbances in the North-West
Frontier Province, and even in Calcutta.
The Delhi _Hartal_ brought for the first time into full relief the close
alliance into which the Mahomedan Extremists had been brought with the
Hindu Extremists, as well as the influence which both had acquired over
a considerable section of the lower classes in the two communities. The
political leaders had fallen into line in the Indian National Congress
and the All-India Moslem League during the 1916 and 1917 sessions, when
they united in demanding Home Rule for India, and they had united since
then in rejecting as totally inadequate the scheme of reforms
foreshadowed in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report. But not till towards the
conclusion of the war did the Mahomedan Extremists discover a special
grievance for their own community in the peace terms likely to be
imposed upon a beaten Turkey. That was a grievance far more likely to
appeal to their co-religionists than the political grievances which had
formed the stock-in-trade of Hindu Extremism, if they could be worked
upon to believe that Great Britain and her allies were plotting not
merely against the temporal power of the Ottoman Empire, but against the
Mahomedan religion all over the world by depriving the Sultan of Turkey
of the authority essential to the discharge of his office as Khalif or
spiritual head of Islam.
The agitation was at first very artificial, for the bulk of Indian
Mahomedans had until recent years known very little about and taken
still less interest in Turkey, and their loyalty had never wavered
during the war. Some of the leading Indian Mahomedans had indeed openly
disputed Sultan Abdul Hamid's claim to the Khalifate of Islam when he
first tried at the end of the last century to import his Pan-Islamic
propaganda into India. But the long delay on the part of the Allies in
formulating their Turkish peace terms allowed time for the movement to
grow and to carry with it the more fanatical element amongst Indian
Mahomedans. The Government of India tried in vain to allay Mahomedan
feeling by receiving deputations from the _Khilafat_ Association founded
to prosecute an intensified campaign in favour of Turkey, and professing
its own deep anxiety to procure what it called "a just peace with
Turkey," for which the Indian delegates to the War and to the Peace
Conferences in Europe had been constantly instructed to plead. The
greatest success which the _Khilafat_ agitators achieved was when Mr.
Gandhi allowed himself to be persuaded by them that the movement was a
splendid manifestation of religious faith, as he himself described it to
me. For, once satisfied that the cause which they had taken up was a
religious cause, he was prepared to make it his own without inquiring
too closely into its historical or political justification. For him it
became a revolt of the Mahomedan religious conscience against the
tyranny of the West just as legitimate as the revolt of the Hindu
conscience against the same tyranny embodied in the Rowlatt Acts. Whilst
Mahomedans proved their emancipation from narrow sectarianism by joining
in the _Satyagraha_ movement of passive resistance in spite of the Hindu
character impressed upon it by its Sanscrit name, it was, he declared,
for Hindus to show that they, too, could rise above ancient prejudice
and resentment by throwing themselves heart and soul into the _Khilafat_
movement. Both movements were to be demonstrations of the "soul-force"
of India, to be put forth in passive resistance according to his
favourite doctrine of _Ahimsa_, the endurance and not the infliction of
suffering.
But Mr. Gandhi, with all his visionary idealism, was letting loose
dangerous forces which recked naught of _Ahimsa_. Hindus and Mahomedans
"fraternised" at the Delhi _Hartal_ in attempts to compel its observance
by violence which obliged the authorities to use forcible methods of
repression, and of the five rioters who were killed two were Mahomedans.
These deaths were skilfully exploited by the Extremists of both
denominations, and a day of general mourning for the Delhi "martyrs" was
appointed. The spark had been laid to the train, and Hindus and
Mahomedans continued to "fraternise" in lawlessness, arson, and murder
wherever the mob ran riot. Systematic attempts to destroy railways and
telegraphs at the same moment in widely separated areas pointed to the
existence of a carefully elaborated organisation. Public buildings as
well as European houses were burnt down in half a dozen places, and
Europeans were often savagely attacked and done to death, nowhere more
savagely than at Amritsar, where five Europeans, two of them Bank
managers, were killed with the most fiendish brutality, and a missionary
lady, known for her good works, barely escaped with her life. The
authorities were not slow to take stern measures. Troops were rapidly
moved to the centres of disturbance, flying columns were sent through
the country, and armoured cars and trains and aeroplanes were used to
disperse the rioters. A Resolution issued by the Government of India on
April 14 asserted its determination to use all the powers vested in it
to put down "open rebellion" even by the most drastic means. By the end
of the month the Viceroy was able to announce that order had been
generally restored, though in some places there was still considerable
effervescence.
Had the measures taken, however stern, been confined to the repression
of actual violence and to the punishment of the guilty, the reaction
produced amongst the great majority of Indians by the atrocities which
Indian mobs had committed, and the appalling spirit of lawlessness which
inspired them, would probably have been at least as great as the
impression which they at first made upon Mr. Gandhi himself, who
suddenly recognised and admitted that he had underrated the "forces of
evil" and advised his disciples to co-operate, as he himself had done at
Ahmedabad, with Government in the restoration of order. The _Satyagraha_
Committee, of which he was President, resolved to suspend temporarily
"civil disobedience" to the laws, and the fraternisation between
Mahomedans and Hindus cooled down, when important Mahomedan associations
began to protest against the desecration of mosques by the admission of
Hindu "idolaters" to deliver fiery orations to mixed congregations
within the sacred precincts. But before the reaction could take real
effect, it was arrested by rumours of terrible happenings in the course
of the repression in the Punjab which turned the tide of Indian feeling
into an opposite direction, and for those rumours there ultimately
proved to have been no slight foundation.
The methods adopted in the Punjab had been very different from those
adopted in the Bombay Presidency, where there had been scarcely less
menacing outbursts in some of the northern districts, besides serious
rioting in Bombay itself. In Ahmedabad, the second city of the
Presidency, mob law reigned for two days. There were arson and pillage,
and murder of Europeans and Government officers. Troops had to be
hurried up to quell the disturbances, and for a short time the military
authorities had to take charge. The repression was stern; 28 of the
rioters were killed and 123 wounded in Ahmedabad alone. There were many
arrests and prosecutions. But those stormy days left no bitterness
behind them. The use of military force was not resented, because it was
directed only against the crowds actually engaged in violent rioting.
Martial law was never proclaimed, nor did the military authorities
prolong the exercise of their punitive powers beyond the short period of
active disorder, nor strain it beyond the measures essential to the
suppression of disorder. They never interfered in administrative
matters. The Bombay Government kept their heads, and there was nowhere
any wholesale surrender of the civil authority into military hands. Mr.
Gandhi, who had been turned back by the Punjab Government when he tried
to enter the Punjab, was left free by the Bombay Government, and the
value of his assistance in restoring order in Allahabad, whilst he was
in his first fit of penitence, was acknowledged by the authorities.
Very different was the intensive enforcement of martial law in the
Punjab. Even when all allowance is made for the more dangerous situation
created by a more martial population and the proximity of an always
turbulent North-Western Frontier with the added menace at that time of
an Afghan invasion, nothing can justify what was done at Amritsar where
the deliberate bloodshed at Jallianwala has marked out April 13, 1919,
as a black day in the annals of British India. One cannot possibly
realise the frightfulness of it until one has actually looked down on
the Jallianwala Bagh--once a garden, but in modern times a waste space
frequently used for fairs and public meetings, about the size perhaps of
Trafalgar Square, and closed in almost entirely by walls above which
rise the backs of native houses facing into the congested streets of the
city. I entered by the same narrow lane by which General Dyer--having
heard that a large crowd had assembled there, many doubtless in
defiance, but many also in ignorance of his proclamation forbidding all
public gatherings--entered with about fifty rifles. I stood on the same
rising ground on which he stood when, without a word of warning, he
opened fire at about 100 yards' range upon a dense crowd, collected
mainly in the lower and more distant part of the enclosure around a
platform from which speeches were being delivered. The crowd was
estimated by him at 6000, by others at 10,000 and more, but practically
unarmed, and all quite defenceless. The panic-stricken multitude broke
at once, but for ten consecutive minutes he kept up a merciless
fusillade--in all 1650 rounds--on that seething mass of humanity, caught
like rats in a trap, vainly rushing for the few narrow exits or lying
flat on the ground to escape the rain of bullets, which he personally
directed to the points where the crowd was thickest. The "targets," to
use his own word, were good, and when at the end of those ten minutes,
having almost exhausted his ammunition, he marched his men off by the
way they came, he had killed, according to the official figures only
wrung out of Government months later, 379, and he left about 1200
wounded on the ground, for whom, again to use his own word, he did not
consider it his "job" to take the slightest thought.
In going to Jallianwala I had passed through the streets where, on April
10, when the disorders suddenly broke out in Amritsar, the worst
excesses were committed by the Indian rioters. But for General Dyer's
own statements before the Hunter Commission, one might have pleaded
that, left to his own unbalanced judgment by the precipitate abdication
of the civil authority, he simply "saw red," though the outbreak of the
10th had been quelled before he arrived in Amritsar, and the city had
been free from actual violence for the best part of three days. But, on
his own showing, he deliberately made up his mind whilst marching his
men to Jallianwala, and would not have flinched from still greater
slaughter if the narrowness of the approaches had not compelled him
regretfully to leave his machine-guns behind. His purpose, he declared,
was to "strike terror into the whole of the Punjab." He may have
achieved it for the time, though the evidence on this point is
conflicting, but what he achieved far more permanently and effectively
was to create in the Jallianwala Bagh, purchased since then as a
"Martyrs' Memorial" by the Indian National Congress, a place of
perpetual pilgrimage for racial hatred.
Then, two days after--not before--Jallianwala came the formal
proclamation of martial law in the Punjab, and though there were no more
Jallianwalas, what but racial hatred could result from a constant stream
of petty and vindictive measures enforced even after the danger of
rebellion, however real it may at first have seemed, had passed away?
Sir Michael O'Dwyer protested, it is true, against General Dyer's
monstrous "crawling order," and it was promptly disallowed. But what of
many other "orders" which were not disallowed? What of the promiscuous
floggings and whippings, the indiscriminate arrests and confiscations,
the so-called "fancy punishments" designed not so much to punish
individual "rebels" as to terrorise and humiliate? What of the whole
judicial or _quasi_-judicial administration of martial law? The
essential facts are on record now in the Report of the Hunter Committee
and in the evidence taken before it, though its findings were not
entirely unanimous and the majority report of the European members, five
in number including the president Lord Hunter, formerly
Solicitor-General for Scotland, was accompanied by a minority report
signed by the three Indian members, two of them now Ministers in the
Government of Bombay and of the United Provinces respectively, who on
several points attached graver importance to the circumstances which
they themselves had chiefly helped to elicit from witnesses under
examination. Upon the Report the Government of India and His Majesty's
Government expressed in turn their views in despatches which are also
public property. The responsibility of the Government of India was so
deeply involved, and in a lesser degree that of the Secretary of State,
that in neither case was judgment likely to err on the side of severity.
The Government of India certainly did not so err, and one must turn to
the despatch embodying the views of the British Government for a
considered judgment which at least set forth in weighty terms the
principles of British policy that had been violated in the Punjab,
however short some may consider it to have fallen of the full
requirements of justice in appraising the gravity of the departure from
those principles in specific cases.
The Punjab tragedy has had such far-reaching effects in shaking the
confidence of the Indian people in the justice and even in the humanity
of British rule that it is best to quote the language in which the
British Government recorded their judgment in their despatch to the
Government of India:
The principle which has consistently governed the policy of His
Majesty's Government in directing the methods to be employed, when
military action in support of civil authority is required, may be
broadly stated as using the minimum force necessary. His Majesty's
Government are determined that this principle shall remain the
primary factor of policy whenever circumstances unfortunately
necessitate the suppression of civil disorder by military force
within the British Empire.
It must regretfully but without possibility of doubt be concluded
that Brigadier-General Dyer's action at Jallianwala Bagh was in
complete violation of this principle.
The despatch proceeded to take into account the provocation offered and
the great difficulties of the position in which General Dyer was placed.
His omission to give warning before opening fire was nevertheless
declared to have been "inexcusable," his failure to see that some
attempt was made to give medical assistance to the dying and the wounded
an "omission from his obvious duty," and the "crawling order" issued by
him six days later "an offence against every canon of civilised
government."
Upon a military commander administering martial law in a hostile
country there lies a grave responsibility; when he is compelled to
exercise this responsibility over a population which owes
allegiance and looks for protection to the Government which he
himself is serving, this burden is immeasurably enhanced. It would
prejudice the public safety, with the preservation of which he is
charged, to fetter his free judgment or action either by the
prescription of rigid rules before the event or by over-censorious
criticism when the crisis is past. A situation which is essentially
military must be dealt with in the light of military considerations
which postulate breadth of view and due appreciation of all the
possible contingencies. There are certain standards of conduct
which no civilised Government can with impunity neglect and which
His Majesty's Government are determined to uphold.... That
Brigadier-General Dyer displayed honesty of purpose and unflinching
adherence to his conception of his duty cannot for a moment be
questioned. But his conception of his duty in the circumstances in
which he was placed was so fundamentally at variance with that
which His Majesty's Government have a right to expect from and a
duty to enforce upon officers who hold His Majesty's commission
that it is impossible to regard him as fitted to remain entrusted
with the responsibilities which his rank and position impose upon
him. You have reported to me that the Commander-in-Chief has
directed Brigadier-General Dyer to resign his appointment as
Brigade Commander, and has informed him that he would receive no
further employment in India and that you have concurred. I approve
the decision and the circumstances of the case have been referred
to the Army Council.
With regard to the administration of martial law the despatch considers
it
impossible to avoid the conclusion that the majority of Lord
Hunter's Committee have failed to express themselves in terms
which, unfortunately, the facts not only justify, but necessitate.
In paragraphs 16 to 25 of chapter xii. of their report the majority
have dealt with the "intensive" form generally which martial law
assumed and with certain specific instances of undue severity and
of improper punishments or orders. It is unnecessary to
recapitulate the instances which the Committee have enumerated in
detail in both their reports, nor would any useful purpose be
served by attempting to assess, with a view to penalties, the
culpability of individual officers who were responsible for these
orders, but whose conduct in other respects may have been free from
blame or actually commendable. But His Majesty's Government must
express strong disapproval of these orders and punishments and ask
me to leave to you the duty of seeing that this disapproval shall
be unmistakably marked by censure or other action which seems to
you necessary upon those who were responsible for them. The
instances cited by the Committee gave justifiable ground for the
assertion that the administration of martial law in the Punjab was
marred by a spirit which prompted--not generally, but unfortunately
not uncommonly--the enforcement of punishments and orders
calculated, if not intended to humiliate Indians as a race, to
cause unwarranted inconvenience amounting on occasions to
injustice, and to flout the standards of propriety and humanity,
which the inhabitants not only of India in particular but of the
civilised world in general have a right to demand of those set in
authority over them. It is a matter for regret that,
notwithstanding the conduct of the majority, there should have been
some officers in the Punjab who appear to have overlooked the fact
that they were administering martial law, not in order to subdue
the population of a hostile country temporarily occupied as an act
of war, but in order to deal promptly with those who had disturbed
the peace of a population owing allegiance to the King Emperor, and
in the main profoundly loyal to that allegiance.
This clear enunciation of bed-rock principles and emphatic condemnation
of many of the methods of repression used in the Punjab would have done
more to reassure the public mind in India had the actual punishment
inflicted on General Dyer and a few others been more commensurate with
the gravity of the censure passed on their actions, and in any case it
came far too late. It came too late to stem the rising tide of Indian
bitterness, intensified by many gross exaggerations and deliberate
inventions, which lost all sense of proportion when the Extremists
demanded Sir Michael O'Dwyer's impeachment, though many responsible
Indians had expressed their unabated confidence in him before he left
the Punjab on the expiry of his term of office, just after the troubles,
in terms more unstinted even than those in which the Government of India
and the British Government conveyed their appreciation of his long and
distinguished services--services which assuredly no errors of judgment
committed under great stress could be allowed to overshadow. It came
too late also to correct the effects of the panic that had taken
possession of the European mind when it was still largely in ignorance
of the actual facts. For most Europeans had at once rushed to the
conclusion that the outbreak in the Punjab, in which no single Sepoy
ever took part, was or threatened to be a reproduction of the Mutiny. In
the first days, as a measure of precaution, European women and children
had been hurriedly collected into places of refuge lest the horrible
excesses perpetrated by the Indian mob at Amritsar might prove the
prelude to a repetition of Cawnpore. The hardships and anxiety they
underwent and the murderous outrages actually committed on not a few
Europeans moved most of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen to
unmeasured resentment, and not until they gained at last a fuller
knowledge of all the facts so long allowed to remain obscure did a
gradual reaction set in against the belief which was genuinely
entertained by most Europeans, non-official and official in India, and
which spread from them to England, that General Dyer's action and the
rigours of martial law alone "saved India."
What drove the iron into the soul of India more than the things actually
done in the Punjab, for which many Indians admit the provocation, was
the reluctance of her rulers to look them in the face, and the tardiness
and half-heartedness of the atonement made for them. Not till nearly
half a year after the troubles had occurred did the Government of India
announce the appointment of the Hunter Committee of Inquiry, and this
announcement was coupled with the introduction of a Bill of Indemnity
for all officers of Government engaged in their repression, which wore,
in the eyes of Indians, however unreasonably, the appearance of an
attempt to shelter them against the possible findings of the Committee.
Again nearly half a year passed before the report of the Committee was
made public, and the bloom had already been taken off it for most
Indians by the report of a Commission instituted on its own account by
the Indian National Congress which, partisan and lurid as it was, never
received full refutation, as the witnesses upon whose evidence it was
based were, for technical reasons, not heard by the Hunter Committee.
The complete surrender of civil authority into military hands first at
Amritsar, and then, under orders from Simla, at Lahore and elsewhere,
was, as His Majesty's Government afterwards acknowledged, a disastrous
departure from the best traditions of the Indian Civil Service. But,
whatever the mistakes committed by the civil authority in the Punjab or
by those charged with the administration of martial law in that
province, there is above the Punjab the Government of India, and its
plea of prolonged ignorance as to the details of the occurrences in the
Punjab can hardly hold water. The preoccupations of the Afghan war which
followed closely on the Punjab troubles were no doubt absorbing, but had
the Viceroy or the Home member or the Commander-in-Chief or one of his
responsible advisers proceeded in person, the moment the disorders were
over, to Lahore or Amritsar, barely more than a night's journey from
Delhi or Simla, is it conceivable that a halt would not have been
forthwith called to proceedings which these high officers of state were
constrained later on unanimously to deplore and reprobate? And if the
Government of India were too slow to move, was there not a Secretary of
State who knew, from statements made to him personally by Sir Michael
O'Dwyer on his return to England, at least enough to insist upon
immediate inquiry on the spot? Mr. Montagu has seldom, it is believed,
hesitated to require in the most peremptory terms full information on
far more trivial matters. Had prompt action been taken in India, there
would never have been any need for the Hunter Committee. As it was,
Indian feeling had run tremendously high before its findings were made
public. So when the Government of India and the Secretary of State
published their belated judgment, the people of India weighed such a
tardy measure of justice against the dissent of an important minority in
the House of Commons and of the majority of the Lords, the stifling of
discussion in the Indian Legislature, which was still more directly
interested in the matter, and above all the unprecedented public
subscriptions in England and in India for the glorification of General
Dyer, whilst the Punjab Government was still haggling over doles to the
widows and orphans of Jallianwala--and, having weighed it, found it
lamentably wanting, until at last the Duke of Connaught's moving speech
at Delhi for the first time began to redress the balance.
The story of Jallianwala and all that followed in the Punjab scattered
to the winds Mr. Gandhi's threadbare penitence for the horrible violence
of Indian mobs, and he poured out henceforth all the vials of his wrath
on the violence of the repression, far more unpardonable, he declared,
because they were not the outcome of ignorant fanaticism, but of a
definite policy adopted by European officers high in rank and
responsibility. There was no longer any doubt in his mind that a
Government that tolerated or condoned or palliated such things was
"Satanic," and that the whole civilisation for which such a Government
stood was equally Satanic. For Indians to co-operate with it until it
had shown "a complete change of heart" was a deadly sin. To accept any
scheme of constitutional reforms as reparation for the wrongs of the
Punjab with which the wrongs of Turkey were linked up with an increased
fervour of righteous indignation when the terms of the treaty of Sèvres
became known, was treachery to the soul of India. Thence it was but a
step to the organisation of a definite "Non-co-operation" movement to
demonstrate the finality of the breach. Mr. Gandhi appealed in the first
place to the educated classes to set the example to the people. He
called upon those on whom the State had conferred honours and titles to
renounce them, upon barristers and pleaders to cease to practise in the
law-courts, and upon parents to withdraw their children from the
schools and colleges tainted with State control and State doles. If
parents would not hearken to him, schoolboys and students were exhorted
to shake themselves free of their own accord. To the people he opened up
simpler ways of "Non-co-operation" by abstaining from tea and sugar and
all articles of consumption and of clothing contaminated by alien hands
or alien industry. If all would join in a common effort he promised that
India would speedily attain _Swaraj_--the term mentioned was generally a
year--and, quit of the railways and telegraphs and all other instruments
and symbols of Western economic bondage, return to the felicity and
greatness of Vedic times. All this, however, was to be done by "soul
force" alone and without violence.
In the course of the only long conversation I had with Mr. Gandhi I
tried to obtain from him some picture of what India would be like under
_Swaraj_ as he understood it. In a voice as gentle as his whole manner
is persuasive, he explained, more in pity than in anger, that India had
at last recovered her own soul through the fiery ordeal which Hindus and
Mahomedans had undergone in the Punjab, and the perfect act of faith
which the _Khilafat_ meant for all Mahomedans, and that, purged of the
degrading influences of the West, she would find again that peace which
was hers before alien domination divided and exploited her people. As to
the form of government and administration which would then obtain in
India, he would not go beyond a vague assurance that it would be based
on the free will of the people expressed by manhood suffrage for which
Indians were already ripe, if called upon to exercise it upon truly
Indian lines. When I objected that caste, which was the bed-rock of
Hindu social and religious life, was surely a tremendous obstacle to any
real democracy, he admitted that the system would have to be restored to
its pristine purity and redeemed from some of the abuses that had crept
into it. But he upheld the four original castes as laid down in the
Vedas, and even their hereditary character, though in practice some born
in a lower caste might well rise by their own merits and secure the
deference and respect of the highest castes, "such as, for instance, if
I may in all modesty quote my own unworthy case, the highest Brahmans
spontaneously accord to me to-day, though by birth I am only of a lowly
caste." I tried to get on to more solid ground by pointing out that,
whatever views one might hold as to his ultimate goal, the methods he
was employing in trying to break up the existing schools and colleges
and law-courts and to paralyse the machinery of administration was
destructive rather than constructive, and that, confident as he might
feel of substituting better things ultimately for those that he had
destroyed, construction must always be a much slower process than
destruction; and in the meantime infinite and perhaps irreparable harm
would be done. "No," he rejoined--and I think I can convey his words
pretty accurately, but not his curious smile as of boundless compassion
for the incurable scepticism of one in outer darkness--"no, I destroy
nothing that I cannot at once replace. Let your law-courts with their
cumbersome and ruinous procedure disappear, and India will set up her
old _Panchayats_, in which justice will be dispensed in accordance with
her own conscience. For your schools and colleges, upon which lakhs of
rupees have been wasted in bricks and mortar for the erection of
ponderous buildings that weigh as heavily upon our boys as the
educational processes by which you reduce their souls to slavery, we
will give them simpler structures, open to God's air and light, and the
learning of our forefathers that will make them free men once more." Not
that he would exclude all Western literature--Ruskin, for instance, he
would always welcome with both hands--nor Western science so long as it
was applied to spiritual and not to materialistic purposes, nor even
English teachers, if they would become Indianised and were reborn of the
spirit of India. Indeed, what he had looked for, and looked in vain
for, in the rulers of India was "a change of hearts" by which they too
might be reborn of the spirit of India. He hated no one, for that would
be a negation of the great principle of _Ahimsa_, on which he expatiated
with immense earnestness.
As I watched the slight ascetic frame and mobile features of the Hindu
dreamer in his plain garment of white home-spun, and, beside him, one of
his chief Mahomedan allies, Shaukat Ali, with his great burly figure and
heavy jowl and somewhat truculent manner and his opulent robes
embroidered with the Turkish crescent, I wondered how far Mr. Gandhi had
succeeded in converting his Mahomedan friend to the principle of
_Ahimsa_. Perhaps Mr. Gandhi guessed what was passing in my mind when I
asked him how the fundamental antagonism between the Hindu and the
Mahomedan outlook upon life was to be permanently overcome even if the
common cause held Hindus and Mahomedans together in the struggle for
_Swaraj_. He pointed at once to his "brother" Shaukat as a living proof
of the "change of hearts" that had already taken place in the two
communities. "Has any cloud ever arisen between my brother Shaukat and
myself during the months that we have now lived and worked together? Yet
he is a staunch Mahomedan and I a devout Hindu. He is a meat-eater and I
a vegetarian. He believes in the sword, I condemn all violence. But what
do such differences matter between two men in both of whom the heart of
India beats in unison?"
I turned thereupon to Mr. Shaukat Ali and asked him whether he would
explain to me the application to India under _Swaraj_ of the Mahomedan
doctrine that the world is divided into two parts, one the "world of
Islam" under Mahomedan rule, and the other "the world of war," in which
infidels may rule for a time but will sooner or later be reduced to
subjection by the sword of Islam. To which of these worlds would
Mahomedans reckon India to belong when she obtained _Swaraj_? Mr.
Shaukat Ali evaded the question by assuring me with much unction that
he could not conceive the possibility of the Hindus doing any wrong to
Islam, but, if the unthinkable happened, Mahomedans, he quickly added,
would know how to redress their wrongs, for they could never renounce
their belief in the sword, and it was indeed because Turkey is the sword
of Islam that they could not see her perish or the Khalifate depart from
her.
I wondered as I withdrew how long the fiery Mahomedan would keep his
sword sheathed, did he not feel that his own personality and that of his
brother Mahomed Ali would count for very little without the reflected
halo with which they were at least temporarily invested by the
saintliness of Mr. Gandhi's own simple and austere life of
self-renunciation, so different in every way from their own. For it is
to his personality rather than to his teachings that Mr. Gandhi owes his
immense influence with the people. It is a very different influence from
that of Mr. Tilak, to whom he is sometimes, but quite wrongly, compared.
Mr. Tilak belonged by birth to a powerful Deccani Brahman caste with
hereditary traditions of rulership. He was a man of considerable
Sanscrit learning whose researches into the ancient lore of Hinduism
commanded respectful attention amongst European as well as Indian
scholars. Whatever one may think of his politics and of his political
methods, he was an astute politician skilled in all the ways of
political opportunism. Mr. Gandhi is none of these things. He is not a
Brahman, but of the humbler _Bania_ caste; he does not come from the
Deccan, but from Gujarat, a much less distinguished part of the Bombay
Presidency. He does not claim to be anything but a man of the people. He
looks small and fragile and his features are homely. He lives in the
simplest native way, eating simple native food which he is said to
prepare with his own hands, and dresses in the simplest native clothes
from his own spinning-wheel. His private life is unimpeachable--the only
point indeed in which Mr. Tilak resembled him. Though he lays no claim
to Sanscrit erudition, his speeches are replete with references to Hindu
mythology and scripture, but they usually reflect the gentler, and not
the more terrific, aspects of Hinduism. He blurts out the truth as he
conceives it with as little regard for the feelings or prejudices of his
supporters as for those of his opponents. He will tell the most orthodox
Brahman audience at Poona that if they want to be the leaders of the
nation they must give up their worldly notions of caste ascendancy and
their harsh enforcement of "untouchability"; or he will lecture a
youthful Bengalee audience, intensely jealous of their own language,
upon their shameful ignorance of Hindi, which he believes to be the
future language of India and of _Swaraj_. No one could suspect him of
having an axe of his own to grind. He is beyond argument, because his
conscience tells him he is right and his conscience must be right, and
the people believe that he is right, and that his conscience must be
right because he is a _Mahatma_, and as such outside and above caste.
His influence over the Indian Mahomedan cannot be so deep-rooted, and
the ancient antagonism between them and the Hindus still endures amongst
the masses on both sides; but it is of some significance that his warm
espousal of the grievances which large and perhaps growing numbers of
them have been induced to read into the Turkish peace terms, has led
some of his most enthusiastic Mahomedan supporters to bestow upon him
the designation of _Wali_ or Vicegerent which is sometimes used to
connote religious leadership.
No leader has ever dominated any meeting of the old Indian National
Congress as absolutely as Mr. Gandhi dominated last Christmas at Nagpur
the 20,000 delegates from all parts of India who persisted in calling
themselves the Indian National Congress, though between them and the
original Congress founders few links have survived, and the chief
business of the session was to repudiate the old Congress profession of
loyalty to the British connection as the fundamental article of its
creed, and to eliminate the reference hitherto retained, with the
consent even of the Extremists, to India's participation on equal terms
with the other members of the Empire in all its rights and
responsibilities. The resolution moved and carried at Nagpur stated
bluntly that "the object of the Indian National Congress is the
attainment of _Swaraj_ by the people of India by all legitimate and
peaceful means." Many of the members would have left out the last words
which were intended to ease the scruples of the more weak-kneed
brethren. But Mr. Jinna, a Mahomedan Extremist from Bombay, whose legal
mind in spite of all his bitterness does not blink the cold light of
reason, warned his audience that India could not achieve complete
independence by violent means without wading through rivers of blood.
Mr. Gandhi himself intimated that India did not "want to end the British
connection at all costs unconditionally," but he declared it to be
"derogatory to national dignity to think of the permanence of the
British connection at any cost, and it was impossible to accept its
continuance in the presence of the grievous wrongs done by the British
Government and its refusal to acknowledge or redress them." He explained
that the resolution of which he was the mover could be accepted equally
by "those who believe that by retaining the British connection we can
purify ourselves and purify the British people, and those who have no
such belief." He concluded on a more minatory note: "The British people
will have to beware that if they do not want to do justice, it will be
the bounden duty of every Indian to destroy the Empire"--which Mr.
Mahomed Ali, however, with less diplomacy, declared to be already dead
and buried.
That the "Non-co-operation" programme was reaffirmed at Nagpur except in
regard to the propaganda amongst schoolboys as differentiated from
students, and that threats were uttered of extending passive resistance
to the non-payment of taxes and more especially of the land tax, were
not matters to cause much surprise to those who had measured the sharply
inclined plane down which "Non-co-operation" was moving. But one hardly
sees how Mr. Gandhi can reconcile the racial hatred which was the
key-note of all the proceedings with his favourite doctrine of _Ahimsa_.
He has, however, himself, on one occasion, openly referred to a time
when legions of Indians may be ready to leap to the sword for _Swaraj_,
and though his appeal is to an inner moral force which he declares to be
unconquerable, he does not always disguise from himself or from his
followers the bloodshed which the exercise of that moral force may
involve. In an article in support of the "Non-co-operation" movement in
his organ _Young India_ the following pregnant passage occurs:
For me, I say with Cardinal Newman: "I do not ask to see the
distant scene; one step enough for me." The movement is essentially
religious. The business of every God-fearing man is to dissociate
himself from evil in total disregard of consequences. He must have
faith in a good deed producing only a good result; that, in my
opinion, is the Ghita doctrine of work without attachment. God does
not permit man to peep into the future. He follows truth, although
the following of it may endanger life. He knows that it is better
to die in the way of God than to live in the way of Satan.
Therefore, whoever is satisfied that this Government represents the
activity of Satan has no choice left to him but to dissociate
himself from it.
Are there any limits to the disastrous lengths to which a people may not
be carried away by one who combines to such ends and in such fashion
religious and political leadership?